


The Non-Creepiness of Strangers

by aurilly



Category: Heroes (TV), Lost
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Gen, Lost: Post-Island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-04
Updated: 2010-08-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 22:44:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire and Nathan meet in a bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Non-Creepiness of Strangers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missy_useless](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=missy_useless).



> Set after The End for Lost and just before the beginning of season 2 of Heroes.

Claire sits alone at the bar, nursing a Coke under the intermittent glare of the busy bartender. She knows she should be drinking something stronger, but she doesn’t remember how. It isn’t the action that she’s forgotten (pick up, gulp, swallow); it’s the mind-set.

She isn’t technically alone. Every stool at the Brooklyn Heights pub they’re in is taken. It’s just that the people she came with are elsewhere. Behind her, Miles and Richard sit in close conversation in one of the booths. She was sitting with them before, but she could tell she was just in the way, and when she lackadaisically told them that she was going to the bar to get a drink, they didn’t protest. They haven’t yet noticed that she never came back.

Nothing’s changed. Despite their kind words and good intentions, people still barely notice whether or not she’s missing.

Kate and Sawyer are on the West Coast. Claire tries to tell herself that it isn’t abandonment, that the only two people she knows fairly well haven’t callously left her with two people who are almost strangers. Kate said that once the story of the missing Ajira flight broke, the parole officers probably came to check on her; she wants to see how much trouble she’s in and find out where Aaron and Claire’s mother have gone. Sawyer went to visit some people, in California and in Maine, but didn’t say who. They both said they’d be back soon.

Claire wants to believe that’s true.

In the meanwhile, she’s been left alone in a strange city with a ghostbuster and an ex-immortal who don’t know how to talk to her and don’t do a good job of trying.

“How old are you?” she hears.

The man next to her, with a growing beard and ill-fitting clothes that look like they belong to someone younger, smaller, and hipper, is speaking to her. It would be a strange pick-up line, if indeed it were a pick-up line (Claire can remember those from years---lifetimes---ago), but there’s something different in this man’s voice and eyes. He isn’t chatting her up; he actually wants to know.

“Twenty-five,” she answers, sneaking a look at Richard and Miles to see if they’re looking. (They aren’t.) They’ve been trying to keep her from talking to people. They don’t trust her.

The man snorts and leans closer to her, practically falling on top of her. “Bullshit. No really, how old are you? I swear, I’m not a cop. I just want to know.”

“I told you, I’m twenty-five.” Claire tries to pull away from him, but the man on the other side of her is too close.

However, this repeated answer seems to appease him. He sits up again and appraises her, for the third time. “You look a lot younger.”

Claire stares down into her glass again, clasping it with both hands and drawing stripes in the condensation with her thumbs. She thinks about Australia, about long ago when she was as young as she looks. “I used to get that a lot.”

“Not anymore?” he asks, incredulous.

“It hasn’t come up in a long time. It’s probably still true. I don’t know.”

He stares at her hair, at what’s left of long ago glory. It had been too tangled to save (sometimes Claire wonders if that’s true of more than just her hair), so the woman in the salon had lopped it off into a pixie cut. She hates it. She’s ugly.

“You look like someone I know. Except for the hair. The girl I’m thinking of has longer hair.”

Claire winces. It’s as though he’s reading her mind. “I had long hair, too, up until a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh yeah?” He’s stopped looking by now. She can tell he doesn’t care. But this is an opportunity to practice the lies she needs to get used to telling. The others are all so good at it; they came into this with a lot more experience.

“Sun damage?” she tries.

He grunts. It’s good enough. “I like your accent. Where are you from?”

Claire thinks. She knows the right answer, but it doesn’t feel true anymore. It feels falser than the lie she just told. “Australia.”

“That’s a long way from here.”

“You have no idea,” she muses.

Her response makes him look at her more sharply. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, but he rolls with it. Claire can tell that even with alcohol numbing his mental processes, this is a very sharp man.

“How long is the flight?” he asks after a minute.

He’s just providing an expected and appropriate response. Conversation. Claire’s out of practice making it. So is he, she can tell, and that’s why she slides in her chair to be a few inches closer to him, even though they’re talking about nothing. He’s a stranger, but she likes him; he’s paying attention to her, and there’s something about him that tells her he’s just as broken inside as she is, that no one talks to him anymore either. They should stick together.

“I don’t know how long it is. I mean, I can’t remember.”

He responds well to her slight change in body language, because he becomes more open himself, more concerned and interested. “Are you here all by yourself?”

“No. I came with…” Claire gestures vaguely at Miles and Richard and the man follows the direction of her fingers towards the table by the wall.

He whistles. “Wow, you’ve been a third wheel tonight, haven’t you?”

Claire looks at them again, and understands for the first time what’s been going on. It’s so obvious; she doesn’t know how she missed it. Her social skills really must have declined for her not to have noticed in the past few days. “I guess so. Yeah.”

She realizes that he’s been asking all the questions so far. He doesn’t seem to mind, but if she’s going to use this encounter as practice, she should try to even the balance. So, she starts asking him about himself---where he’s from, what he’s doing here, etc. It turns out that they have a lot in common, if not in details, then at least in baggage. He’s just lost some people close to him (check), he’s not working right now (check check), and some weird stuff happened to him recently that he doesn’t really want to---_can’t_, Claire has a feeling---talk about (triple check).

So instead, they talk about nothing for awhile---Sydney, accents, the Olympics. It’s nice, and Claire never wants it to stop. With the others, she feels like they’re always either talking about stuff, or pointedly _not_ talking about it, which is just as bad.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks suddenly. He’s leaning all over her, but somehow it isn’t lecherous. His presence is oddly comforting. Claire wonders if he’s enjoying not talking about whatever his issues are, too.

“Sure. But I’ll have to stay if my friends notice I’m leaving and try to stop me.” (They won’t.)

The man casts a glance towards Miles and Richard. “They won’t.”

Now that he’s helped her to see what’s going on, Claire feels slightly less upset about having been ignored, but it still doesn’t change her decision to leave with this guy. At least he’s actively interested in spending time with her. She hasn’t taken to anyone---_let_ herself take to anyone---in years. Maybe going with him is the first step to recovery.

Simultaneously, they slide their barstools backwards, and not even the loud screech gets Claire’s companions’ attention. The man holds out his hand, and Claire slips her own tiny one into it. “I’m Nathan,” he says as they leave the bar.

“My name’s Claire,” she replies.

“Of course it is.” He chuckles, and Claire can’t understand why, but he has a nice laugh, so she doesn’t care.

They’re in luck; there’s a taxi dropping some people off in front of the bar just as they’re leaving. Claire and Nathan climb in, her dejectedness and his drunkenness making them a disorganized jumble in the backseat. Nathan gives the driver the name of an intersection, numbers that mean nothing to her. However, she’s surprised when soon they’re crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Manhattan skyline is glistening in front of them.

“If you live in Manhattan, then why were you drinking all the way in Brooklyn?” she asks.

Nathan just looks out the window, not at her, and states, “I don’t live in Manhattan.”

At this, Claire knows she should want to run away, jump out of the car, start screaming for help, but she doesn’t. Her survival instincts are attuned to other kinds of dangers, and this guy isn’t triggering any of them. Also, just a few weeks ago, she was using a boar skull as a baby proxy. Who is she to find anyone creepy?

Nathan seems to realize what his words must have sounded like. “Sorry. That came out wrong. We’re just going to the apartment I’ve been staying in for the past few days. I swear, you’re safe with me. I’m not a rapist or a serial killer or anything.”

“Isn’t that what you would say if you _were_ a serial killer?” she asks, just as a joke. She doesn’t think he is any of those things.

“Nah, if I were a serial killer, I’d have skipped the talking and the taxi ride and just cut your head open in the alley.”

It’s almost a miracle that he _still_ remains not creepy. “That’s pretty specific for someone who isn’t a serial killer.”

Something dark and fleeting passes behind his eyes. “A serial killer killed my brother once.”

It’s odd and something feels off about his statement: serious but flippant. It’s the word ‘once’ that confuses Claire and keeps her from passing on her condolences.

So they continue driving. He doesn’t just live---_not live_\---in Manhattan, he is not living way uptown. The city looks beautiful from this highway, the famous buildings she used to want to see in person revealing themselves as they turn around a bend. The soaring modernity and implied density strike her in a way that quieter Brooklyn hasn’t. She really is back in the real world. _So many people_, she thinks. _So many people are on this little island._

“What is this road called?” she asks. She wants to remember, wants to hug Nathan for giving her this moment.

“The FDR. After Roosevelt.”

It takes Claire longer than it should to put the name with the identity. History is something she hasn’t thought about in forever.

“The FDR. Right. Thanks.”

He finally turns to face her, and grins a wolfish grin that not even the beard can swallow up. “First time in the city, huh?”

“First time _anywhere_, actually.” Sydney was a home now forgotten. The island was nowhere. The places they’d passed through on their way to New York had been mere way stations. This is the first time in years that she’s felt as though she was somewhere real.

Nathan starts talking about the city, in a hitched stream of words that is enough to give her the impression that when left to his own devices, he’d rather be a short-spoken man, but he’s practiced giving speeches. In talking to her, he’s trying to turn something back on that has been off for a long time. She’s doing the same thing. They’re both trying to remember how to live.

“You should be a politician,” she thinks aloud, as they pull up in front of an apartment building and exit the cab. She hasn’t been listening to the words he’s saying, just the sounds he’s making. “You have such a nice speaking voice.”

He unlocks the front door and they get in the elevator. “I _was_ a politician.”

“What happened?”

He shrugs and looks at the ceiling, his hands in his pockets sticking out forwards. “A lot of things happened. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

He probably doesn’t mean for it to be a challenge, but Claire needs to take it as one. She needs to tell someone, even if they won’t believe her. She needs it to be real, in a way that the others would prefer it wasn’t. They’d all had each other, or at least other people, the whole time. They don’t know what it’s like to have been completely alone and wonder every day if you’re dreaming, or crazy, or dead, or worse.

She’s speaking before she’s even made up her mind whether or not it’s a good idea. “What if I told you I just spent the last three years living alone in the jungle on a magical island where there are monsters and time travel and people who come back from the dead?”

He doesn’t do any of the things she thinks he should do. He doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t tell her that’s crazy and ridiculous and impossible and obviously a joke. No. Instead, he just shrugs again.

“What if I told you I could fly? Or that a week ago, my entire body was covered in third-degree burns, but I woke up the other day completely healed?”

Claire is furious. She’d thought they’d had a connection, that they were on the same wavelength. She’d been honest in her misleading exposition of fact that ought to be fiction. He, on the other hand, is simply pulling her leg.

Or…

Wait.

“_Can_ you fly?” she whispers as he unlocks the door. She refuses to believe that the only new person she’s felt any kind of bond with is mocking her. She has to believe she’s right about him.

He looks at her, hard. And it’s odd, because it’s not in a you’re-crazy-because-you-think-I-might-be-telling-the-truth kind of way. It’s more of a how-much-do-you-know kind of scrutiny.

“Were you really on a magical island?”

Neither of them answers the question, but knowing that he takes her seriously is enough for her. And if he can fly… well… Claire doesn’t know what to think about that, but it’s probably part of the baggage he doesn’t want to talk about.

They’re in the apartment by this point. It looks dusty and sad, as though no one’s lived in it for awhile, but no one has packed it up, either. It's decorated in a personality-free way, as though either it's a bland rental that came with furniture, or someone other than the person who lived there bought all the stuff without taking into account the things the tenant might actually like. It looks like Nathan---covered in ill-fitting accessories that are younger, smaller, hipper than the expensive and more mature base they're on.

“If this isn’t your apartment, then where are we?”

“This was my brother Peter’s place.”

He says it so brokenly, that he can only mean one thing. This time, Claire feels prompted to say “I’m sorry,” but it still doesn’t feel quite right. And she has a feeling that he isn’t talking about the serial killer anymore.

Instead of responding to her condolences, he just asks if she wants a drink. Claire shakes her head no.

“I have a brother, too,” she confesses. Nathan’s finally done it. He and his grief have chipped away at the wall damming up the grief she doesn’t know how to think about. The words spill out of her mouth, garbled and confused. “Or I did. For a couple of days. He’s dead now, too… I think.”

Nathan gives her the same suspicious look he gave her when she failed to laugh at his flying confession. “You _think_?”

Claire thinks of Sayid. She thinks of her father, of Locke, of _herself_. “You never know. Trust me. Maybe even your brother…”

It’s as though she’s just suggested something to him that he hadn’t thought of before, and for one glorious second, Nathan’s face lights up with something like hope, before settling down again. He stumbles to a cabinet and pulls out a bottle of scotch and a glass. “Normally I’d actually agree with you. Not many would, you know, but _I_ would. However, he blew up, you see. There’s no coming back from that.”

Claire smiles. “I got blown up and I’m still here.”

Her nonchalance causes Nathan to chuckle. “Aren't you full of surprises? Just like...” He drifts off, doesn't finish his thought.

“What was he doing when he blew up?” she asks.

Nathan takes a big gulp. “Just saving the world.”

“Mine, too.”

He cocks an incredulous eyebrow towards her. “Really?”

She nods, and finally takes a seat on the couch. He hasn’t yet invited her to sit, but she figures he wants her to.

“Yeah, it’s sort of complicated,” is Claire’s understatement of the century. Kate and Sawyer have tried to explain, and Richard tried to fill in more information, but none of them has any real clue as to what was going on, so it hasn’t helped.

Nathan comes to sit beside her, not too far away but also not too close. “Isn’t it always?”

For the first time, Claire wonders what she’s doing here. He doesn’t seem to expect her to sleep with him. He doesn’t seem to expect _anything_ from her.

“Why did you bring me here, Nathan?”

Nathan leans back into the cushions. “I’ve been staying here for the past few days. I wanted to feel closer to him. I guess I’m not ready to let go yet. And you… you look like someone who should be here with me and with him. And you looked like you needed a break from your chaperones.”

“You were right.” Claire suddenly feels like standing. Nathan watches, bemused, as she crosses the room, turns on another lamp, looks around her. It’s the first home she’s been in in years, and she wants to take it all in, even if it isn’t hers, even if it belongs to someone who’s probably dead.

She dances her fingers along the mantelpiece, reveling in the treasure trove of photographs taken throughout the years and displayed in mismatched frames of varying sizes. In almost all of them, she sees the same good-looking guy---similar to Nathan around the eyes if not the smile---looking back at her. Peter. He’s full of life and innocence in a way she hasn’t seen in anyone she still knows. There’s something about him that reminds her of Jack: the same earnest soul. Nathan’s in a lot of the pictures, too.

“You’re so much handsomer without the beard,” she notes.

He laughs and rubs his chin. “I know.”

Then she spots it, and the world shrinks to the size of a small island sometimes found in the Pacific. It shrinks to the size of this room. Maybe they’re the same size. Maybe the world was never bigger than this to start with.

The fear and fury she’s been holding back ever since she got off the island finally erupt. Without warning, Claire flings herself at Nathan, kicking, punching, screaming. Why didn’t she run when he’d first started talking about serial killers in the cab? “Who are you? Where are we? Why do you have this?”

“What the---?” She’s taken Nathan by surprise, and hits him squarely in the lip, but after that, he wraps his arms around her, pinning her hands together behind her back and pinioning her legs with his. He’s strong and he’s clearly well-trained (moves like Sayid, she thinks). Soon, he has her completely immobilized. She gives up fighting him and just falls against him, sobs wracking her body. After three years of striking terror into the hearts of Others, Claire she realizes that now, here, without her gun and axe and traps, she’s just a ninety-pound girl going up against a guy almost twice her size. She doesn’t want to be helpless all over again; she doesn’t want to be a damsel in distress, the kind of girl who gets kidnapped.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asks, and then takes a sweeping glance over where her eyes had lingered before she’d lost it. “The pictures… Do you know someone in them? Do you know Peter?”

His eyes go glassy, and there’s hopeful awe in his voice that makes Claire realize that whatever she’d feared isn’t in play here. Nathan’s single-minded desperation about his brother supersedes any other motivation he could possibly have. It’s just a coincidence, the kind of insane coincidence she’s become accustomed to by now.

“No, not Peter. Look.” She squirms, signaling that she wants to point. Nathan, too overcome to remain on the defensive, releases her. Claire points at the last photo she’d looked at. Peter, younger than in a lot of the more recent ones, and a blonde girl, taller than Peter, with an innocent, warm-hearted smile that Claire had started seeing on her face only towards the end.

“You know her?” Nathan asks.

“Shannon… she was a friend of mine. What is she doing here?” Now Claire’s crying again, but not because she’s afraid.

Nathan lets her go and picks up the picture. “They went to the same boarding school, dated for awhile. She died. Peter’s girlfriends have a habit of doing that. _He_ has a habit of doing that,” he muses.

“It was an accident,” Claire mumbles hollowly, repeating the “comforting” words that had been told to her over and over again, but which hadn’t numbed the pain of losing her only girly-girl friend on the island---her last girly-girl friend ever.

“Yeah,” Nathan says, handing her the picture so she can look more closely. “Peter told me she was in that plane crash three years ago. The one whose remaining survivors disappeared all over again a few weeks ago. That place is the _real_ Bermuda triangle.” Nathan goes back to the couch and pours another glass of scotch. More to himself than to her, he murmurs, “Sometimes I think I should fly over there myself. Disappear.”

“Don’t.” Some lies are too hard to attempt, so she leaves it at that. “What happened? I mean, why did they break up?” Claire knows that it doesn’t matter. They were just teenagers; high school romances are fleeting by definition. But she wants to ground this in some kind of reality, connect it somehow: a past she never knew about with the present she’s scared to dive into.

Nathan drinks and looks vaguely ashamed of himself. “Their brothers didn’t like it.”

“I see.” Claire remembers how Boone had been… apparently Nathan was the same way. Interesting. Claire wishes she’d had more time with Jack. She wonders if maybe all older brothers are the same. She’ll never know.

“How’d you two meet?” Nathan asks.

Claire stares at the photograph. She’s quickly learning that lies come easier when they are truths. “It was… It was just before she died. We spent a few weeks camping together at the beach.”

Nathan scoffs. “Shannon went camping? She didn’t seem like the type.”

“You’d be surprised. She was really good with knots. She helped me fix my tent a bunch of times.”

“That’s funny,” he says, changing the subject. “That you know her, and you’re all the way from Australia. Small world, huh?” But Nathan’s looking at Claire in a way that belies the words. They both know that it _isn’t_ a small world, and there are _way_ too many coincidences in life for it to be just that.

Sawyer likes to say that the reason they survived was because they were the ones who had no use for fate or destiny. The others always agree, and they’re so proud of themselves. Claire keeps quiet during those discussions. She doesn’t tell them about her psychics and her dreams. She doesn’t tell them that maybe she does believe in all of that stuff---always has.

It makes her wonder if maybe this means she didn’t actually survive. She certainly feels like it sometimes.

For the first time in the evening, there’s an awkward pause as they stare into one another's eyes. They know what normal people would be doing in such a situation, but they aren't doing it, nor are they feeling particularly inclined to try. There's something wrong with them, even though there's nothing wrong with _this_.

“I have a wife,” he blurts out as though they’re having an affair (they’re not) and confessing will make everything okay (it won’t).

“I have a son,” she replies. They read one another, the way his brow lowers, the way her chin rounds. The words go unspoken. _They don’t want us anymore. We’re too damaged._

Claire knows this isn’t what this is about, but she kisses him anyway, just because it seems like the normal thing to do. His beard is like her old hair---matted and scratchy and making it harder to reach the soft lips underneath. He starts to kiss her back but then stops, and pushes her away gently.

“We shouldn’t do this.”

“Why not?” She doesn’t even feel rejected; she’d only done it because she hadn’t known what else to do.

“The person you look like… the one I was telling you about… She’s my daughter. I don’t even know her, only found out she existed a few months ago. You’re very pretty, Claire. But even still, kissing you is... You even have the same name, the same habit of surviving explosions. I'm sorry.”

Claire rubs her chin where his beard grazed her. “Don’t be sorry. I get it. It’s like with my brother, the one who’s probably dead. I used to think he was sort of… well… dreamy. That was before I found out we were related, though.” The long-secret confession shames her into a blush and she looks away. “You really should shave your beard off. It’s itchy.”

He sees the blush and is good enough to go along with her abrupt change of gears. “We’ll see.”

Claire looks through the doorway to the kitchen and sees the microwave’s digital clock. It’s almost midnight.

“I should probably get going. Miles and Richard might start worrying about me. I’m a loose cannon, you see.” She giggles, the first twinge of craziness that’s surfaced all evening. Nathan’s been a calming presence, and she’s about to lose him.

Nathan gives her one final once-over. “I can believe that. Come on, I’ll get you a cab.”

Claire takes one last look around the apartment. It isn’t her home, it isn’t even Nathan’s, but she’ll remember this place.

“Thanks for this,” she tells him as they head downstairs.

“No, thank _you_. You're a good sport, tagging along to my dead brother’s house with me for no reason.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a worn business card. “Here. I don’t have a pen on me, but if you call this number, my secretary will pass on the message. If ever need anything, give me a call.”

Claire turns the card over and over in her hands, rubbing her fingers over the embossed letters. He’s a lawyer, although judging from the age of this card, perhaps it’s been awhile. “I don’t have any contact information,” she admits, hoping he'll understand instead of taking it as a put-off.

He gets it. “I had a feeling you didn’t.”

Nathan walks to the edge of the sidewalk and sticks out his arm. There are more taxis in Manhattan than in Brooklyn, and it’s only a second before one pulls over in front of them. Nathan tells the driver the address of the pub in Brooklyn they were in and hands Claire about the same amount of cash that he paid on the way over here. He helps her in and starts to close the door after her, but then hesitates. Bending down so that his head sticks just inside the car, he says, “You know that magical island you were talking about? The one with monsters and time travel and where the dead come back to life?”

“Yeah?” she asks, wondering where he’s going with this.

“Well, there are monsters and time travel and people who come back to life here, too. It’s all the same, Claire, everywhere you go. Trust me. And thanks for the reminder.”

Better than Kate’s pep talks or Richard’s pearls of immortal wisdom or Miles’s secrets from the dead or Sawyer’s nuggets of common sense, _this_ is what finally comforts Claire. She doesn’t have to forget to get better. She doesn’t have to pretend it never happened or separate her different existences.

“Thanks,” she says. “And about your brother… He might be…”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Nathan slams the car door shut, and the driver moves the gear shift. As they pull away, Claire watches Nathan watching the car, his feet half on and half off the curb and his body rocking back and forth like a great big kid, whether from peace or drunkenness, Claire can’t tell and doesn’t care.


End file.
